© KATHLEEN DOOHERAs a teenager, Michael Smith was good at math, so he majored in engineering at the University of Memphis. But he wasn’t nearly as keen on making machines as his peers were. “That just didn’t excite me very much,” he recalls. “And the class I enjoyed maybe the most as an undergraduate was just Biology 101.”
At the urging of his thermodynamics professor, he applied for and received a spot in the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, and between his junior and senior years joined the lab of University of Memphis biologist Jae-Young Rho to study how cells sense compression. “It was just a summer project for an undergrad, so I admit I accomplished basically nothing, but I did learn a little bit about the concept,” he says. METHODS: The experience prompted Smith to pursue a graduate degree in biomedical engineering with Klaus Ley at the University of Virginia. There, Smith studied how leukocytes escape the vasculature and enter infected tissues in need of immune defenders. He first had to determine the thickness of “an invisible layer,” ...
